President Obama Signs Law Allowing Moon Express Lunar Mining Rights

November 25, 2015

Historic law recognizes the rights of Moon Express to own resources harvested from the Moon

Today, history was made when President Obama signed legislation into law recognizing and promoting the rights of Moon Express to explore, harvest and own resources from the Moon. This historic law was passed as Title IV of the “U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act”, making the United States the first nation to explicitly recognize private sector mining rights for water and minerals obtained from the Moon.

Moon Express applauds the President for supporting Moon Express’ mission of harvesting lunar resources. The “Space Resources and Utilization Act of 2015” protects and supports Moon Express’ interests to expand the economic sphere of Earth to the Moon and beyond.

“Today’s signing is a giant leap for mankind and Moon Express,” said Moon Express co-founder and Executive Chairman, Naveen Jain. “I am super excited that President Obama has recognized the rights of Moon Express to harvest and own lunar resources that can be used for the benefit of humanity. The Moon is our sister planet that has an incredible amount of natural resources, including helium-3 that can provide clean and limitless fusion energy for the entire world.”

The Obama administration has been supportive of an increasing role of the private sector in the American space program, mandating NASA to select private sector partners wherever possible. NASA selected Moon Express in 2014 under its Lunar CATALYST program to help build the capability to return the United States to the surface of the Moon.

Moon Express recently demonstrated the capability of its lunar lander vehicle at the NASA Kennedy Space Center, and was awarded a $1M prize by Google as the first private company to flight-test a lander vehicle in the Google Lunar XPRIZE competition.

“Moon Express is grateful to have the backing of the United States in our quest to harvest lunar resources,” said Moon Express co-founder and CEO, Bob Richards. “We thank the President, the Congress and the visionary champions of the bill, particularly Marco Rubio (R-FL), Lamar Smith (R-TX), Patty Murray (D-WA), Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Bill Posey (R-FL) and Derek Kilmer (D-WA), for their leadership and support of our emerging private sector space resources industry.”